Category — Books

I had the concentration span of a gnat this year, and I read comparatively less than I have in previous years. Like last year, I am writing this sweltering in a revolting Sydney summer, though this time I’m drinking bourbon, revisiting NIN’s Pretty Hate Machine, newly remastered. And so here we go!

The Complete list:

Looking at this list, it’s interesting to see what patterns emerge. Typically I go through a big Lily Brett stage at least once a year, and I’m still obsessed with evil media barons. Some things never change! My reading plan for 2011 is quality over quantity, though I would like to read more than I did this year, and I’m taking part in an online book club dedicated to sci-fi novels written by women, which I think will be really interesting.

Reading remains one of the things I love doing most.

I’m afraid of large bodies of water. When I read this passage from Shutter Island, it almost perfectly captured how I feel:

It was warm and clear out there, but the water was threaded with dark glints of rust and an overall pallor of gray, a suggestion of something growing dark in the depths, massing – Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane, p. 28.

For my birthday back in October, my mum gave me $100 and instructions to buy books. Even 12 months ago, I would have spent that $100 locally and maybe come away with three books, four at most.

Not these days though, not with The Book Depository. While it’s nice to buy locally, the prices of the books on Book Depository are just so ridiculously cheap [even taking into account that their "free" shipping is built into the cost of the books] that it’s virtually the only place I buy from now, and so I put a call out to friends and asked for book recommendations and ended up buying the following ten books:

Mystic River – Dennis Lehane
Dust – Elizabeth Bear
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon
Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
Gone Baby Gone – Dennis Lehane
Songs of the Doomed – Hunter S Thompson
The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon – Tom Spanbauer
Shutter Island – Dennis Lehane
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson

Most of them I am holding off reading until next year, when I’m going to try quality over quantity, but I started reading the Lehane books recently, as I’d rented the film version of Gone Baby Gone and remembered how much I like all three films based on the  above Lehane books.

Airport novels, blockbusters, books where the author’s surname takes up a third of the space on the cover: these are not typically the books I read. I don’t think it comes from book snobbery, I just tend to not enjoy the way these kinds of books are written, even when on holiday when you’re meant to relax everything, even your reading muscles. No. I don’t do relaxed. Not even with my holiday reading. When I went to Thailand, what did I take? The court transcripts of the Scooter Libby trial. Seriously Julia, what the what? So heavy was that book that the spine split [when I left it open and face down in the hot island sun and went swimming and then got a massage, whoops].

I started the Lehane books with trepidation and was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying them quite a lot. Sure, I’ve discovered I prefer the film versions more, which tend to edit out some of the more unbelievable plot twists, but it’s been really nice to get on the train at the end of every day and get lost in Boston crime. Good job Dennis Lehane, good job.

One of my best friends is a gay rock writer named Ross Raihala, and Ross once told me that he always suspected straight midwestern teens looked at Axl Rose the same way closeted gay teens looked at Morrissey, the British vocalist who fronted the intellectually penetrating and eternally melancholy band the Smiths. When Raihala first mentioned this, I did not really understand what he meant (or if it was supposed to be a compliment or an insult). But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Rose did mean something more than his glam peers, especially for people who lived in the middle of nowhere. For rural kids who were too smart for where they were, but still very much a reflection of rural culture – a “redneck intellectual,” if you will – Axl wasn’t just another cool guy in a cooler-than-average band. He was an iconoclast (in the truest sense of the word). He didn’t speak for us, but he sort of represented us. And in a weird way, Rose slowly evolved into the first artist of my generation who showed glimpses of an (ahem) “alternative” to the larger-than-life fairy tale of poofy-haired metal that was the template for all my favourite bands (including Guns N’ Roses – at lease initially). In a few years, flannel-clad grungers would turn that alternative into an art form, and Rose would subsequently become a ridiculous recluse. Nobody got fucked by the Age of Irony as much as Axl – Chuck Klosterman, Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nörth Daköta, pgs 36 – 37.

The Hitch, on his visit to North Korea:

In the basement of my hotel, a casino had been opened by Chinese riffraff from the gambling capital of Macao, who once tried to stop me from playing blackjack because I was wearing peasant sandals and was thus improperly attired. In a karaoke bar in downtown Pyongyang, while I regaled customers with a spirited rendition of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” “La Bamba,” and, as the night wore on, “Proud Mary,” my Korean friends preferred the soothing banality and individualism of “Yesterday” and – a solid favourite – “My Way” … One night I snuck off for a sauna and massage … As I took my aching joints back to the hot tub, I saw one of my guides materializing, naked and glistening through the steam. When our eyes met we conceded unspokenly that we’d both gone above and beyond the call of duty – Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty & War, pgs 158 and 160.

The Hitch on driving a red Corvette on Route 66:

I also came to the painful realization that was to recur to me times without number. A shiny red Corvette can be a boy magnet, alright. When parked, it drew to my side many garage mechanics and hotel doormen and learned young black men and polite old roadside coots who would inquire after the finer points and details. When in motion it would summon cops from deserted streets and vacant landscapes. But it appeared to leave the female sex quite unmoved. Could it be a fault in the design? Perhaps the silhouette? I began to brood, and in fine brooding country.

***

A convincing rainbow-coalition band with a very strong sax is doing its stuff, and the tourist hour seems to have safely passed, until a terrifying skull-faced blonde detaches herself from a gaggle and whacks me in the features with a star wand. “How ya doin’?” I always think, What kind of question is that?, and I always reply, “A bit early to tell.” She gives me another smack with the wand and holds it up so I can see the number “50″ emblazoned at the center. “It’s mah birthday!” Christ. Does she know about the Corvette? - Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty & War, pgs 158 and 160.

When I read this, I couldn’t help but imagine what would have happened had Hunter S Thompson joined The Hitch in this trip.

E from the band Eels, on working with Tom Waits:

I immediately get off the phone and get my old four-track cassette recorder out of the closet, only to learn that it records at twice the speed of Tom’s four-track recorder. I bring this up to my recording engineer, Ryan, and we realize the best thing to do is to look on eBay for the same model Tom owns and we find one immediately, which is sent over the next day. I record my parts on to two tracks of the cassette tape and leave the other two tracks for Tom to fill. I send the tape to him with detailed instructions of what I want him to do. He ignores my instructions completely, accidentally erases my lead vocal track and sends me back a tape of him stomping on his bathroom floor, yelling and crying like a baby. You don’t tell Tom Waits what to do. It’s great. He’s very apologetic for erasing my vocal and offers to do yard work at my house to make up for it. I, of course, am thrilled by the whole thing. Tom Waits erased my vocal – Things the Grandchildren Should Know, Mark Oliver Everett.

Typically I’m not really a big fan of secondhand books, but I love my copy of Ariel. The scribbles in it are almost as interesting as the poems themselves.

I was the only patron in the bar of the Crockett Hotel. The barman wanted to talk. He had grown up in San Antonio, in a poor neighbourhood. Crime, violence and gang warfare were part of daily life. While still a schoolboy, he was walking home with two friends one night when a man appeared from the shadows with a revolver and fired point-blank at the boy beside him. But the gun misfired. They stood and watched as the man cursed and fumbled with the gun – and then they ran for their lives. Ever since, he had wondered what it would be like to die – American Journeys, p 258-259.

Recently I’ve been reading Christopher Hitchen’s Hitch-22. In the chapter in which he discusses his mother’s suicide, he mentions that he has never found a text about the topic of suicide which he felt shed light on why someone like his mother might commit suicide. As tends to be the case in my reading, one small thing triggered thoughts I wanted to follow up, in this case, re-reading Eclipse.

When I was about 13, I wrote to Antonella Gambotto to tell her how much I loved both collections of her journalism. I don’t think I really expected anything in return, but instead she invited me to spend the day with her in Sydney. We spent the day talking, she took me to magazine offices and introduced me to editors and I spent most of that time gobsmacked and feeling very out of my depth.

The reason I found her so intimidating, which I couldn’t understand then, and which I wouldn’t realise for many years, was that she is one of a very few people I’ve met who have been able to carry their power, their intelligence and their sexuality in a completely unabashed way. 

It was an intimidating thing for a 13-year-old girl.

In subsequent years, I followed her writing, whether it was features, reviews, her blog or novels. Her writing is succinct, witty and in every instance, satisfying. Around 2004, I heard about Eclipse.

Eclipse is a very intimate, very raw and absolutely compelling study of suicide and the lives of people left behind, from philosophical, psychological and personal points-of-view. Antonella lost both an ex-fiance and brother to suicide and Eclipse is her account of the devastating impact it has had on her life and how it has influenced her views on the act of suicide, and the treatment of depression.

It is a small, but powerful book, challenging and difficult at times to read, but one which I have come back to several times now, because in a strange way, it clears my head and I really believe its publication and subsequent promotion opened discussion about an issue which is, dangerously, one of the last taboos.